Perlmann's Silence (72 page)

The last incongruity occurred to me only the next morning when I was shaving: how did Lufthansa know my home address, when it was my work address that was on the text? No one in Germany knows where I live. (Apart from you, of course.) That ran through my head again and again over the course of the day, and struck me as the one insoluble mystery. Of course, there’s the possibility of an envelope with the home address on it. But there’s something artificial about that (another deus ex machina!). And besides, wouldn’t they have sent that portentous envelope as well? That’s what I would have done. An open envelope in someone’s hands doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is also the addressee. And if someone receives a nameless text, he’s more likely to make sense of things if an envelope addressed to him arrives with it, than if there are no clues at all. (If he hasn’t just fished it out of a waste-paper basket, the current owner of the envelope will be one of the acquaintances of the addressee, and the author of the text will eventually be found among them.)

Whatever. The more natural story, I finally and reluctantly admitted, is that I didn’t write my work address on it at all: if my memory deceives me over the question of whether I took the text out of my case – why couldn’t it deceive me here, too? Contrary to my usual habit, I wrote my private address on it, simple as that. It unsettles me to find that I plainly can’t rely on my memory. That used not to be the case. An experience which, of course, fits Gorky’s subject and my thesis (even though that connection, as you know, is more complicated than it might superficially appear). If the experience were not so awkward . . .

In spite of all these explanations: a hint of strangeness, of mystery, still remains. As if a drama had been played out around this text, of which its actors have no notion . . . If that had happened to Gorky – he would have made something of it!

What happened outside the world during the six days that followed – I haven’t the faintest idea. I can’t even remember the weather. I was typing things out, filling gaps, going on typing, reconstructing the next missing thought, and so on. As long as I hadn’t finished the day’s workload, I simply didn’t stop, regardless of how late it was getting and how much my back hurt. The tension was so great that I even brought myself to ask a hated neighbor to do some food shopping for me. (She couldn’t believe her ears. Since then our relationship has been excellent!)

Between Wednesday night and Friday morning I rewrote the lost conclusion. The text isn’t nearly as good as the original one. In fact, it’s even rather shoddy. Somehow I was so exhausted that I couldn’t really keep my thoughts together. And temporarily I felt as if my earlier impression of having found a coherent solution for the problem of appropriation was pure delusion, a Fata Morgana. I didn’t go to bed. I just dozed for half an hour on the sofa every now and again. I think there are a few typing errors. But shortly after eight on Friday morning the thing was finished.

I walked slowly through a thick, fairy-tale snowstorm to the institute, and made several copies there. I savored the moment when I laid the manuscript on the table in front of the Chair of the Commission. He had given up expecting it, and you could see that he was distressed. I could swear that he had already made promises to someone else (I don’t know to whom) which he would now have to revoke. I think he really hated me at that moment.

All that weekend I just slept, ate, slept. The Commission’s meeting, I discovered later, was that Monday morning, and the decision was to be made at around midday: they simply couldn’t do anything other than give me the post. (Of course, in that short time no one had read the text. Once again they were concerned only with externals such as length.) But they kept me waiting. No one informed me. Then, when I called on them yesterday, I was informed of the result in an insultingly casual manner. And I also discovered that the conditions for the post are worse than expected. Still, though, it’s a permanent post, so I can breathe for the first time. I would have liked to celebrate with someone: but the only possible person would have been Yuri (the one with the fifty dollars) and he wasn’t there. I tried to call you, but those endlessly engaged phone lines are hopeless, so I started this letter, which I had to interrupt because my exhaustion caught up with me.

I think a lot about that wonderful week with you all. I will send you a copy of the text under separate cover. (You will probably be annoyed if I say this, but still: I don’t think it will be too difficult for you.) I would really like to send all the other colleagues a copy – so that they can see that this portentous text really exists! Because it’s a nightmare typical of our profession: being invited to give a lecture somewhere – and you have no text! How easy it is to feel that the others think you’re a fraud! But perhaps it will end up being translated and published. Can you envisage that any more clearly now?

I hope to hear from you soon. You struck us all as seriously exhausted, and I hope you will soon recover. I felt that you didn’t want us to mention Agnes, so I just want to assure you that there was a lot of sympathy for your difficult situation in the group.

And let me add one thing in conclusion: even when you were here, I had the feeling I had a friend in you. After my week with you I am now sure of it. You showed an interest in my work that no one has ever shown before. And the way you were interested in Klim Samgin showed me that we have much else in common. I don’t need to stress how much I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Do svidaniya. Yours Vassily

That last paragraph brought tears to Perlmann’s eyes once more. But now they were no longer tears of relief, but of shame, and he hid his face in the cushion. When he went to the bathroom afterwards, to wash his tear-drenched face, he felt a weight lifting from him, one so powerful that he had had to turn his emotions away from it all the time, to be able to bear it at all. He lay down, exhausted, on the sofa, and after a while he read the letter again.

The worst passages, he found, were the ones about the prison and the parenthetical remark about Perlmann’s knowledge of his private address. Then came the passage about the drama and the unknown actors, and it was also unbearable that Leskov, because he had no one to celebrate with, had tried to call him – him, of all people, when he had been a hair’s breadth away from murdering him. Only in the course of the day did Perlmann manage to smile about one passage or an other, which he read several times, and it was always an endangered smile that didn’t dare to go too far for fear of subsiding into tears once more. When evening began to fall, he went to the piano and played the Nocturne in D flat major. Blind with tears, he kept hitting wrong notes.

62

In mid-December Perlmann went to Hamburg to see Hanna Liebig. Her golden hair had developed a silvery sheen, and under the dark strand that she combed emphatically over her forehead there was a long scar, which, as she said with embarrassment, was the result of a car accident. She was still energetic. But there was, he thought, something washed-out and disappointed in her face. He liked her apartment, but an overly ornate clock and some ceramic knick-knacks bothered him, because they struck him as whimsical – as if they were signs that Hanna’s finely honed sense of elegant design was deserting her.

Over dinner he told her about the research group, about Millar and their rivalry. He also mentioned that he had played the A flat minor Polonaise. Afterwards she had some idea of why he had phoned her. But without the tunnel, the fear and the despair the whole thing sounded hollow and childish. When she ran her hand playfully over his hair on the way to the kitchen, as she had done in the past, he was about to start over from the beginning and tell her the whole story. But something in her face, something new that he couldn’t have described, seemed strange to him, and then the feeling was over. They talked again for a while about Liszt, but it was mere shop talk, which soon bored him, because it had no connection with Millar and the ochre-colored armchairs in the lounge. Afterwards in the street he reflected that they had been closer to one another recently on the phone than during the whole of their meeting that evening.

They had arranged to meet for lunch the following day. Perlmann didn’t go. As he heard her playing through a run and explaining something, he slipped a note under the door of her apartment and then took the bus to the Conservatoire. The sound of Mozart came from the room where he had always practiced in the past. After a while he opened the door a crack. At the piano sat a man with curly hair and an oriental face, playing with unimaginable lightness. The room had different wallpaper now, and the painting by Klee was no longer on the wall. He carefully closed the door. He had planned to seek out the street where he had grown up. But when he saw the black iron fences in his mind’s eye, and felt his arm hopping from one fence post to the next, he abandoned the plan and took the next train to Frankfurt.

In his mailbox there was a message from the post office about a package. He could see straight away that it was from Leskov, when the clerk took it from the shelf the following morning. He wished it hadn’t come, whatever it might contain. Leskov’s letter was what he had needed, and he had had to endure it. He had found its thoroughness oppressive, but it was hard to admit this to himself. It had been the most extreme thing he could bear, and it was the last he wanted to hear from Vassily Leskov. Fine, he would have to give him some kind of reply. But that could be done in a conventional tone. There were moods in which Perlmann scribbled down such things without any inner involvement. And then he never wanted to hear from Leskov again. Never again.

Inside the parcel was the promised copy of Leskov’s text. Underneath it, four volumes in Russian, bound in light-brown artificial leather:
Maxim Gorky, Zhisn’ Klima Samgina.
On the first page of the first volume it said in shaky handwriting:
Moemu syno Vasiliyu.
The dedication was written in black ink, and the pen had sprayed, there was a sprinkle of black dots around the words. The leather was worn, stained and in two places torn. It was the volumes that Leskov had read in prison – fourteen times.

Perlmann knew that he was supposed to feel touched, but all he felt was fury, a fury that grew every time he looked at the books. Through those brown volumes with their gold inscriptions, Leskov had managed to make contact with his flat, and Leskov was now present in a way that was almost even more oppressive and paralysing than his physical presence. Now Perlmann also smelled the hint of sickly sweet tobacco that lingered between the pages. He felt that he might be about to lose his head and hurl the books outside into the mud, so he put his coat back on and walked slowly to his block.

Later he set the volumes on the shelf in the broom cupboard and covered them with a dishcloth. Then, when he reluctantly flicked through the typed text, he discovered that Leskov thanked him extravagantly at the start of his acknowledgements for his discussion of an earlier version and his constructive criticism in four footnotes. The burden that had been lifted from him by Leskov’s letter seemed to sink down upon him once more, even though he didn’t understand how that could be, now that Leskov had managed to get the position he wanted.

Perlmann defended himself against the books in the broom cupboard by finishing his review and preparing his course of lectures. When Adrian von Levetzov rang and asked about publication, Perlmann sent off a round letter to his colleagues, claiming that some participants in the group had other plans for their contributions, so that he had abandoned the plan of a special publication. The same day he rang the school authorities and asked about the possibility of taking on a job as a teacher. Not without the proper qualifications, the shrill voice at the other end informed him, and not in the current job market. That night he dreamed of Signora Medici, standing in front of an audience in a tartan skirt and hiking boots, reading sentences in an unknown language from light-brown books, as he looked excitedly in his desk for his crib sheet.

Perlmann’s training in slowness was starting to work. Usually, it was no longer necessary to go to the living room to look at the clock; he simply paused and imagined the ticking. He started thinking about that ticking when he was on the phone, as well, and gradually understood that slowness in reacting could be the physical expression of a lack of subservience. He was so happy about this discovery that he overdid it, and had to fight once more against his tendency to fanaticism.

Now and again, when he sat in this living room late at night and heard the clock ticking, he tried to think about why he had taken his hands off the wheel. Because of Leskov? Because of himself? But it was always the same thing: the thoughts dried up before they had really begun. In his mind, he had been ready to die. Out of despair, admittedly, not out of stoical serenity. Nonetheless, the experience of imminent death had changed something within him. Of course, it had been an error to believe that this change, whose contours were still in the dark, would develop all by themselves into greater confidence and a piece of inner freedom. It wasn’t as easy as that. But what exactly was it that he had to do about it?

One evening, while watching a silly comedy on television, Perlmann laughed again for the first time. Then he remembered the man with the long white scarf from the airport bar, and gulped. But by the next joke he had started laughing again.

The next day he bought the German translation of Gorky’s novel and read it until he came to the passage about the hole in the ice.
Gleaming red
, Gorky called the hands that clutched the edge of the ice, which broke off. Perlmann went into Agnes’s room, to look up the second word. Only when he saw the gap on the shelf did he remember the books he had thrown away. He was startled, as if he had only just found out about it.

Perlmann found the novel heavy going, and the countless philosophical dialogues got on his nerves. He really wanted to put it down. But that day he read another hundred pages, and worked out that he would have to get through at least 120 pages if he was to finish it that year. Often he succumbed to the temptation to ease his attention and just let his eye slip over the pages without really reading. But he never overindulged himself, instead flicking back and reading everything over again with reluctant but embittered precision, knowing that he would immediately forget most of it again. In the first days he told himself that it was a matter of becoming acquainted with part of the mental world in which Leskov had taken refuge in prison. He owed him that, he thought, and each time he did so he stumbled over the vague feeling of not knowing what he thought. Only after a few days did he understand that that wasn’t what drove him to torment himself again by reading it each evening. It was more the vague desire to pay off his debt to Leskov, and atone for his planned murder. After that discovery he felt ridiculous every time he opened the book again. But he kept on with it.

Late in December he rang Maria again. He wished her a Merry Christmas and hoped she would be able to tell him something about the deletion of his text. But nothing more came of it than a friendly exchange of good wishes, which they soon had to bring to an end to avoid embarrassment. He would never find out when the dangerous text was finally destroyed, or whether indeed it had been.

Kirsten came on the second day of the Christmas holidays. As soon as she stepped inside the apartment, she pounced on the new carpet, looked at it from all sides and, finally, lifted it up to look at the label. When she saw the coffee stain, she burst into peals of laughter and gave Perlmann a boisterous kiss. He still didn’t let her wheedle the carpet out of him.

Later she came into the kitchen so quietly that, preoccupied with cooking, he didn’t notice her for a long time.

‘You put away some pictures,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he replied, and looked at her for a moment, the salt cellar in his hand.

‘But you’re leaving these, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘definitely.’

‘Does this Ms. Sand take good pictures?’

‘They’re OK,’ he said.

‘Black and white?’

‘Color.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, relieved, and took a piece of salmon from the plate.

When they were eating, she suddenly lowered her knife and fork, and stared at his hand.

‘You’ve taken off your ring.’

Perlmann blushed intensely. He didn’t say anything.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly, ‘of course that’s your business.’

Later, when they were clearing away the plates, she asked in a pointedly casual way, ‘The blonde in the group, what was her name again?
Evelyn . . .’

‘Mistral,’ he said, and put away the coffee cups.

He was standing in his study when Kirsten handed him his Christmas present: a navy blue sailor’s jersey, the kind he had always wanted. Inside the package there was something else, a book. Nikolai Leskov,
Short Stories
. He was speechless and turned the book around mutely in his hand.

‘A really important writer,’ said Kirsten. ‘Martin’s writing a dissertation on him. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to find a Russian edition. Don’t you like it?’

‘No, I do,’ he said hoarsely, and walked, moist-eyed, to the window.

She wrapped her arms around him from behind. ‘It’s really hard for you right now, isn’t it?’ He nodded.

As always, she walked curiously along his bookshelves. ‘You’ve done some tidying.’

He looked at her questioningly.

‘I don’t see the Russian books.’

Perlmann poked his nose into a desk drawer. ‘I . . . cleared them away. Temporarily.’

‘And the big dictionary I saw in Italy? The one with the revolting paper?’

He nodded.

‘And the volume of Chekhov? I told Martin about it.’

‘I . . . I had a kind of impulse.’

For a while she looked in silence at the wall of books. ‘Then perhaps Leskov wasn’t such a great idea.’

Perlmann gave a start when he heard the name in her mouth.

‘No, no,’ he said quickly, ‘that’s completely different.’ It sounded tired and implausible.

They didn’t talk much as they did the washing-up.

‘Dad,’ she asked into the silence, ‘did something happen down there? In Italy, I mean.’

All of a sudden the hands with which he was cleaning the frying pan were quite numb. He ran the dishcloth over the edge. ‘What do you mean – happen?’

‘I don’t know. Since then you’ve been somehow . . . different.’

He looked at the crumbs floating in the dishwater. An answer was required. ‘I . . . I lost my equilibrium. But it has nothing to do with Italy.’